Mr. Forbes' recollections of the early days of roasting and selling coffee at retail in St. Louis are so illuminating, and paint so interesting a picture of the period that they are printed here to illustrate the conditions that prevailed generally at the time when the commercial roasting machine of the United States was being developed into the modern type. He says further:
Selling roasted coffee was uphill work, as every one roasted coffee in the kitchen oven. People were buying, say, at twenty cents. Our asking twenty-five cents "roasted" called for a lot of explanation about shrinkage, tight cylinders so the strength and flavor could not get away, etc.; while, when they roasted a pound in the oven the flavor scented the whole house, thus losing so much strength to say nothing of the unevenness of their roasts—part raw, part roasted, producing an unpleasant taste. An occasional burned roast at home helped some. They tell of a man who, going out in the back yard and kicking over a clod by accident, uncovered some burned coffee. He called to his wife and wanted an explanation. She acknowledged she had burnt it, and hid it so he would not scold. He said, "We had better buy it roasted in the future and avoid such accidents."
We roasted in the cellar. We had an elaborately polished Reed & Mann engine in one window, two brass hoppered mills in the other, and our boiler was under the sidewalk. We had a mahogany-top counter, oil paintings on the wall, and bin fronts of Chinamen, etc., done by the celebrated artist, Mat Hastings (now dead); so you see we started right.
The fight we had to introduce roasted coffee was fierce. Our argument was on the saving of fuel, labor, temper, scorched faces, and anything we could think of. We talked only three coffees, Rio, Java, and Mocha. When Santos began to come, it was hard to change them over from the rank Rio flavor to the more mild Santos. The latter they claimed did not have the rough taste. They missed it and longed for the wild tang of the Rio.
We did not import, but bought in New Orleans and from several local wholesale grocers. No one delivered. Shipments were f.o.b. St. Louis. Draying and packages were extra. Coffee was not cleaned or stoned, but was sold as it came from the sack. However, we did not use any very low grades then. If any one complained of the stones hurting their mills, we advised them to buy ground coffee, showing how it kept better ground as it was packed tight, whereas the roasted was looser and the air could get through it. It was fully a year or more before we began to sell in quantities to make it profitable. In roasting for others, we got a cent per pound; and after awhile, that became so much a business it paid all our expenses. We were the first to roast coffee by steam power west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains.
The tea department helped us to hold out until coffee got its hold on the public; for in those days every one used tea and insisted on having it good. Price was no object. How different now!
Five years later (1862) J. Nevison, an Englishman, drifted into town and opened at 85 North Fourth Street. He got out a very bombastic circular which caused us to put out the one I enclose (illustration, page 436). Then came a party named Childs; and after him, Hugh Menown, grand-uncle of the present Menown, of Menown & Gregory; and Mat Hunt; all passed over to the Great Majority. After the Civil War they multiplied pretty fast, coming and going until now we have nineteen roasting establishments in the city.
The late Julius J. Schotten also wrote the author as follows concerning the days of the Carter roaster and of the wholesale coffee-roasting business founded by William Schotten in 1862:
In the early days, every wholesale grocer was selling coffee; the wholesale grocer controlled ninety percent of the trade in the country. It did not pay the coffee roaster to have men on the road selling coffee in those days. Such being the case, seventy-five percent of the roasting done by the coffee roasters was job roasting, at one cent a pound.
In the beginning there were only two kinds of roasted coffee known to the trade in this section of the country (St. Louis) and of course one of these brands was "Rio"—the other; "Java". The former was a genuine Rio, but the Java was mostly Jamaica coffee.